BOOKS OF THE TIMES

BOOKS OF THE TIMES; By Dorothy Parker, From A to Z

By MARGO JEFFERSON

Published: November 23, 1994

THE POETRY AND SHORT STORIES OF DOROTHY PARKER 457 pages. Modern Library. $15.50.

Dorothy Parker always made good copy. Cole Porter began "It Was Just One of Those Things," his tribute to one-night stands, with the lines "As Dorothy Parker once said to her boyfriend/Fare thee well,/As Columbus announced when he knew he was bounced,/It was swell, Isabelle, swell. . . ." She always made good copy and she still does, what with film tributes, articles and earnest panel discussions. Ever mistrustful, she would probably greet such attention with the wary opening lines of her story "The Little Hours": "Now what's this? What's the object of all this darkness all over me? They haven't gone and buried me alive while my back was turned, have they?" What she would really want to know is, do they think I turned out good writing?

She did, though she turned out some mawkish writing, too. A Penguin paperback, "The Portable Dorothy Parker," has been in print for years; now Modern Library has reassembled all the poems and 24 of the stories in a hard-back volume that looks good, feels good and is reasonably priced.

Her picture is on the cover of "The Poetry and Short Stories of Dorothy Parker." Her wrists are crossed with ostentatious propriety and she has managed to arrange her legs so that they are crossed somewhere between the ankles, where good girls and ladies cross them, and the knees, where clever women and vamps cross them. The bangs are fluffy and soft, the mouth is set, the eyes are cool and severe. That picture hints at all the mixed modes and motives to be found in the stories: the sentiment along with the malice, the honesty and the duplicity, the characters who are lethally smart about every hypocrisy and folly but their own.

Freud gave us the id, the ego and superego. Parker gives us talk, sex (from courtship to copulation) and society: civilization and its maladroit malcontents. In one story they are brittle newlyweds with nothing in common but uncertainty. In another they are a dour aging couple with nothing in common but incompatability. Everyone is out for a good time, a relatively clear conscience and a happy ending. The socialite who is always doing something interesting "like designing her own pajamas or reading Proust" wants these things; so does the big, over-the-hill blonde; so does the young man with the voice as "intimate as the rustle of sheets" whose apartment is filled with ashtrays, gold key chains and monogrammed dressing gowns "that were sent him by ladies too quickly confident, and were paid for with the money of unwitting husbands. . . ."

The man in a Parker story is usually silent, laconic or impatient. He plays straight man to the manic screwball antics and manic actings-out of the women. He is that obscure object of desire (for admiration, love or security) that she always craves and almost never enjoys. We are locked inside the talk and the thoughts of these women. For the most part, we are locked away from what the men really think or want.

Before there was Deborah Tannen's "You Just Don't Understand," there was Dorothy Parker with her maps of misspeaking between the sexes.

" 'Want a cigarette?' he said.

" 'No, thank you,' she said. 'Thank you ever so much just the same.' " Four thank-yous later he bursts out, "Will you for God's sakes stop thanking me?"

" 'Really,' she said, 'I didn't know I was saying anything out of the way. I'm awfully sorry if I hurt your feelings. I know what it feels like to get your feelings hurt. I'm sure I didn't realize it was an insult to say 'thank you' to a person. I'm not exactly in the habit of having people swear at me because I say 'thank you' to them.'

" 'I did not swear at you!' he said.

" 'Oh, you didn't?' she said. 'I see.' "

You see the point. Hell is the other sex, and the road to hell is paved with anxious platitudes. But anyone who has ever spoken or acted out of false pride and real need and shame at that need, anyone who has been highhanded with someone less powerful and ingratiating with someone more powerful can find themselves in Parker's dialogues. And anyone who has ever been alone at the mercy of their worst fears can find themselves in her monologues. Her ear for panic and self-loathing is flawless, whether in a night of insomnia or the stupor of a drunken binge.

With stories like these, why did the Modern Library editors choose to reprint all of her poems, with all their derivative sweetness and their "oh what a naughty girl am I" asides? This kind of poetry is like dated torch singing that tries to spice up tremulous warblings with arch growls and blue notes. (Parker knew it too. The poems are filled with slighting references to "little verses" for "little ladies.") Why not a smattering of the poems and her out-of-print 1951 play, "The Ladies of the Corridor"? It is her version of "A Doll's House," written for unmarried women living in residential hotels and unable to imagine a future not spent "doing what they are doing in the present, which is nothing at all." And though Gertrude Stein did tell Ernest Hemingway that remarks are not literature, a small assortment of Parker's best wisecracks would nearly prove otherwise.

Writing about Isadora Duncan and her lovers, Parker called them lucky men, but added, "she was not a lucky lady." In this case one can say the same about Parker's editors, whatever their sex.